The Inland Sea

by Madeleine Watts

  The boyfriend of the girl with the shiny hair said these were good people. Friends of his, living in a building that had once been used to care for disabled children. The door opened, and a barefoot man ushered us down a dank corridor to what passed for a kitchen. The place was dark inside, with barbed wire over the windows. The ceilings were high, and unseen voices from other rooms echoed off the walls with the thump of the music. It was hard to say how many people were there, in the building, in all those abandoned rooms.

  I walked along the hallway, approaching the thudding music. At the end of the building, an entryway opened into the source of the sound. One of the rooms had once been used for hydrotherapy, when the building still served its purpose. The swimming pool was smaller than average, and now that it had been emptied of water you could see the descending oblongs of space dug deeper into the concrete, until eventually even the tallest person would be totally submerged. The deepest part of the swimming pool was only a few feet long, and had been covered over with a blue tarp to form a kind of ceiling. From above, windows let in the light of the moon from outside. It was oddly peaceful, standing in that wide, empty space, all sounds echoing off the dry swimming pool tiles. I climbed down a ladder to get inside the empty pool. Below the surface, there were couches, bongs, and a television that was turned on but emitted nothing except a glowing purple light. Somebody had written the word love on the screen with strips of gaffer tape.

  You like it? asked one of the men sitting in the swimming pool.

  Sure, I said. I was sitting on the sofa. The men snickered. There was a joke I wasn’t in on.

  I sat in silence on one of the sofas while the men passed a joint from hand to hand. I did not like the way that the television glowed, and the close smell of the space below the tarp. Nothing had ever been cleaned. I wondered why I did not just go home. Only it seemed that leaving would cause some sort of a fuss, and I did not want to seem rude, did not want to look like I couldn’t hack it. Whatever this place was, it was meant to be fun, and I was meant to be enjoying myself.

  A clattering above my head and a platform sandal on the ladder announced the descent of Clemmie into the swimming pool. The men looked up and followed her body as it stumbled towards me on the couch, handing me her beer for a sip and slinging her arm around me as though she were weightless. She was offered the joint and she took it.

  When she turned to me she asked what was wrong. She observed that I was not being chill, and put her arm around me, as though her affection might make me more at ease in the sweet fug of marijuana and disquiet.

  Hey, Clemmie asked, you want to hear something weird? The other day I got off the train at Marrickville and on the platform I found a wallet. It had some money in it, and the woman’s licence and everything. So I took it to the police station, like, just walked it over there. And I guess it was Monday afternoon, so it was sort of a weird time of day. But I went to the police station and walked into the waiting room.

  Waiting room?

  Or whatever it is. It was so eerie. Because I stood there and stood there, but there was nobody behind the desk, and nobody came. It was just empty. And I started to get freaked out, because the door was open, I’d walked right in, but the longer I waited, I started thinking how weird it would be, if the people that run the police had just up and left. Like, what would it be like if everyone who was meant to keep us safe, the city’s protectors, what if they were just gone. No one to take the wallet from me, I could just go out and use the woman’s money, there was no one to hand it to, no one to give it back to her. Just complete freedom to do whatever you wanted because there was no one to enforce the rules anymore.

  They showed up, though, right? Someone took the wallet from you.

  Yeah. Took a long time, though.

  I’ve felt like that sometimes being at Triple Zero, especially the first week. When the police line takes a long time to connect through. Like, maybe there’s nobody there in the police dispatch center. Maybe they all just up and left. And I’m the only person left for whoever is on the phone freaking out. They freak out more the longer the phone rings, and I keep telling them the police will answer as soon as they can, as though I know what the police are doing, but I don’t really know. Literally the only thing I know is that the phone is ringing. Maybe one day they won’t answer at all.

  Yeah, it’s weird, huh?

  We sat together in companionable silence, Clemmie gently combing my hair with her fingers. We were always touching each other, had been always, since we were twelve-year-olds. Picking leaves out of each other’s hair, wiping away biscuit crumbs from skirts, smudging badly applied makeup on each other’s cheeks.

  I turned to her. Do you still walk home with your keys between your fingers?

  Yeah, mostly.

  Clemmie had told me, the year before, about the trick her ex-boyfriend had taught her. He had advised her that if you wanted to fuck somebody up, you could throw a punch with a key wedged between each of your fingers. He advised her to walk down the street at night like this, just in case.

  I sort of do it automatically now, Clemmie said.

  I’ve started doing it too.

  Keys in your fist?

  Yeah. When I have to walk home from work at night. Or on the bus. If it’s late. And it’s one of those eerie, empty night buses with just you and a stranger and the driver. I push the keys between my fingers and just hold on to them. I never used to do that, before I started working at Triple Zero. And it’s only when I come home from work. I dunno, I wish I didn’t. I wish I didn’t know about all the bad things that could happen, didn’t hear about them all day on the phones.

  I think I started doing it when the woman died. In September last year I think it was? In Melbourne. Because I thought maybe if she had fought back then that man wouldn’t have killed her.

  She did fight back, I said, and pulled away from Clemmie. He was bigger and stronger than she was. She did fight back.

  Did she? I dunno. It’s scary, she said. You should quit that job.

  No. I’m fine.

  I stood up and shook my head. I’m going to get another drink, I said, and put a hand on her head as I left. The eyes of the men in the swimming pool followed me as I climbed up the ladder.

  I had no intention of getting another drink. I simply wanted to leave without having to explain myself. It upset me to have her tell me that I was not cut out for my job, and it upset me to talk about the woman who had gone missing in Melbourne the year before. Leave, retreat, no, my body compelled my brain, without any regard for social niceties.

  I walked down a corridor and towards a door I thought might be the exit. Instead, the door led out into the garden, where a shed was rotting into the grass. The garden appeared nearly empty, but I liked how overgrown it was. The moon that I had seen trapped in the glass of the hydrotherapy room was brighter out here, and seemed to fill the evening with light. Cicadas screeched in the trees, and for all the strangeness, I didn’t mind, because it was cooler out there in the dark.

  The only sign of activity was in the shed. Two men sat in the shadow of the open doorway, on plastic orange school chairs. They beckoned me over. Neither of them was wearing shoes. I was handed a beer.

  You from around here? asked one of the men. I told him I lived in Redfern, and had grown up in Ashfield.

  You don’t talk much, do you? he said. I shrugged.

  That’s cool, he said. I like women who don’t talk.

  The stranger gestured to his lap, as though to suggest that I might like to sit there.

  If we were truly rational, we would be deathly afraid of mosquitoes. After all, mosquitoes carry the sorts of diseases that, if you look at the sheer number of lives lost, make them just about the most dangerous insect on earth. I had always been told that cars were more dangerous than planes, and had never really taken the idea seriously, but the first weeks at Triple Zero taught me to reconsider their dangers.

  Cars flipped over. They started smoking. They
ran down children. They veered off the road, they smashed through houses in the middle of the night. They poisoned their passengers. I did not know how to drive, but if I had, I would have stopped. The calls made me walk along footpaths as far away from the road as I possibly could.

  The fear of cars was joined by new, less rational fears—that the fuses would short and the house burn down, that the scaffolding over the footpath would collapse as I walked beneath it, that the waters would rise and swallow the street.

  And so it seemed plausible to me that the Liverpool-bound train I was riding along the Inner West Line could flip, that a body could launch itself in front of the metal as it sped along the tracks, that a man could fling open the door between carriages and rampage through the train with a knife.

  On the seat behind me, two blond girls with dark roots commiserated with each other. He doesn’t deserve you, one said to the other. That’s what I told him! I told him he doesn’t step up his game I’m out of there. I turned my phone black, rested my head against the glass, and watched the houses slip by. I recited the stops to myself from memory, memories from childhood when the city seemed like a shimmering wonderland, and memories from adolescence, when I took the train looking always for something I never seemed to find. This stretch of railway was the measure of how far I was, at any point, from home. Redfern, Macdonaldtown, Newtown, Stanmore, Petersham, Lewisham, Summer Hill, Ashfield. I counted down the stations as they flew by.

  I was on the train because my mother and stepfather were gone for the week, and I had promised to feed the cat. I was welcome to help myself to any food in their absence, and had full license to use both washing machine and dryer.

  All the lights in the house were turned off except for the lamps in the hallway and the front room, because my mother imagined that such a strategy would prevent any potential burglar from supposing the house was empty. I turned the hall lights on and stacked the mail on the hallway table and walked through to the back of the house, where I opened a tin of food and emptied it into the bowl by the back door. There was no sign of the cat. Probably hiding, or else dead from the heat. The news said that January was of hottest-ever days and broken records, 123 by the end of the season. Some days, the heat was so powerful that people died simply sitting in their own homes. The newspapers had started calling it the “Angry Summer.”

  I made tea. On the bench beside me sat a stack of papers from the Saturday before they’d left. The crossword of the Herald, filled out in two sets of handwriting. My stepfather’s spiky consonants against my mother’s neat vowels. An eggy thumbprint from the turning of a page. I opened the alcohol cabinet and poured scotch into a glass, knowing that every year they were gifted a new bottle, that they would barely miss it if I finished it.

  As the light began to dim I took the glass and walked down to the end of the house where the bedrooms were. I opened the door at the top of the hallway and walked into my mother’s bedroom, where the bedside lights were turned on. I had been expressly forbidden to turn them off.

  My mother kept all the photo albums on the top shelf of the wardrobe in her bedroom. There were maybe thirty of them. Putting the glass of whisky down on the bedside table beneath the lamp, I stood on the linen chest at the foot of the bed, opened the door, and pulled down the albums at the very top of the stack. In those albums lived the few pictures there were of my parents and myself together.

  In one photograph my father lay across the bed on the same paisley bedspread my mother still used. I lay beside him, sleeping, my hair knotty, my bottom in the air, face pink in sleep. In the photograph my father looked at me as though he could not quite comprehend what he was looking at. You couldn’t tell anything about him from the photograph, not the Great Explorer whose blood ran in his veins, nor the harm he was capable of. Another photograph showed my father kneeling beside me while I reached out to pat a wallaby in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park shortly before my father left Sydney and moved to Melbourne. “Darlin’ don’t you go and cut your hair,” went the song on the radio from around the same time. When it played I remembered dancing with him in the basement where he kept the sound system. I was too small to really dance. I stood on his feet and we shuffled around the room. I could never remember the words to the rest of the song. But I took the idea of not cutting one’s hair very seriously, particularly if you wanted men to keep calling you “darling.”

  Shortly after my mother and I moved into the house in Ashfield we were burgled. They had come into the room I was in right now, they had opened the wardrobe, they had taken out the photo albums and the boxes and all of her clothes, and they had thrown them on the floor. They didn’t destroy any of the photographs, only scattered them. Instead, the robbers stole the television, the stereo, my mother’s earrings, and my christening bracelet.

  That night my mother had left work in the city, driven to pick me up from childcare, and then taken us home. I remember that it was dark. She opened the corrugated-iron gate to park the car in the fibro shed we had in the garden then. We came in through the back. I walked ahead of her while she locked the back gate, through the garden and up the three steps to the veranda. I noticed in the dark that the back door was smashed through. There’s broken glass, I said.

  My mother pushed me back into the trees and told me to keep quiet. She crept into the house and I watched her move through the smashed-up rooms in her shoulder pads and high heels, looking and watching to see if whoever it was was still there. She squared her shoulders and kept her arms tight to her body. When she couldn’t find anybody in the house she called the police. It was cold in the garden beneath the gum tree in the dark. I was not allowed into the house to see what had been done.

  After the burglary, I sensed for the first time that the new house might not be safe. In the week after the robbery my mother had iron bars placed on all the windows, she had motion-sensor alarms fitted in the bedrooms, and a security screen added to the glass back door so that there would be no more broken glass. We had to leave the lights on when we went out, so that a passerby would assume that somebody was home. But none of the measures she took to keep us safe made any difference when we came home alone at night. She held me behind her, ordered me to stand behind the rubber plant by the entryway, and she opened the door slowly. She disarmed the burglar alarm and entered the house on high alert. She would not turn on the lights until she was certain there was nobody there. Not until I was a teenager was I allowed to walk into the house ahead of my mother, or to stop standing behind the plant. And even then, she was never easy. When I came home late she could never sleep, and sometimes she would call, or text. Be careful, she would say. Practice some responsibility.

  After the burglary my mother never slept deeply again. In the middle of the night she would often wake up, and I would find her half-dressed and peering through the slats of the plantation shutters into the street, looking for the prowler who had made the leaves rustle, the man with a knife edging up the side passage, the killer at the door.

  Sometimes she was watching for a stranger. More often, I think now, she was waiting for my father.

  I closed the pages of the album and opened the thinner folder at the bottom of the stack. As I pulled it onto my lap a large black-and-white image, maybe twenty-five centimeters wide, slid out of the pages.

  The photograph showed a woman, very pale, with red hair, lying naked in a rich stretch of grass. The edges were white once, but yellow now. The photograph cut off just above the woman’s nipples. Her breasts fell gently to the sides of her ribs, like mine. She looked away from the camera, from the man who must have been standing directly over her, maybe lying on top of her, to take the picture. It was my mother, long before I had ever known her.

  I had lived alone with my mother for years and seen her naked a thousand times, but it only occurred to me on looking at that photograph that I looked like her. Had her breasts. And her hair. And an intensity of expression that, looking at the photograph of her stretched out on the grass all thos
e decades ago, I realized had rendered her wholly and utterly vulnerable.

  These are the ways in which I resemble my mother: blue eyes, red curly hair, same smile, same shape of nose and breast and forearm and fingernail, same sensitivity to various citrus fruits. A tendency towards intense feeling. A propensity for shouting. Terrible singing voices. We liked red wine and watermelon and rice pudding with sultanas. We were both, very often, fearful. She liked mangos, but I couldn’t stand them. Every year at Christmas she bought a crate and ate them all herself. She was more cautious than I was. But it wasn’t like I was any less afraid than my mother. I was afraid after the burglary, just like she was. If I wasn’t interested in protection, it was because I didn’t then see myself as something worth protecting.

  One evening, when my mother and I were living with my grandparents, I had stood at the bedroom window in the dark. I was waiting for the arc of car headlights to turn in from the cul-de-sac and progress up the slope to the house.

  I did not like to be left alone.

  I can’t remember how long I stood there in the dark, a tiny quivering figure of fury. I waited and waited, but the light didn’t inch down the driveway. And then I saw the scissors on my grandmother’s dressing table. The ones I was forbidden to touch. I took them in my hand, and stood at the bedroom window, snipping away at my curls as I waited. I could see myself reflected in the dark glass of the window, and it was immensely satisfying to see each strand of hair drop away as I cut it.

  When I was done, a pile of curls lay in a mess all over the carpet.

  And then the car headlights arced up the driveway. The door slammed. My mother entered the house. She progressed down the hallway. She turned the corner of the bedroom and she saw me standing at the window and she saw my hair, and she screamed. What have you done? As though I had killed somebody dear to her.